Announcing New Features and Pricing for Filebase

At Filebase, it has always been our goal to empower users and to provide them with simple, easy access to decentralized storage. We've spent countless hours optimizing our platform to ensure performance and service reliability for everyone. Over the last 3 years, we've closely followed and led trends in the decentralized storage space, but most importantly, we've collected the invaluable feedback that our users have provided us with.

We've listened to that feedback and today, we're happy to announce new features and an updated pricing model for Filebase customers.

New Features

Let's start with a brief overview of some of the new features that we are introducing today.

IPFS Dedicated Gateways

With over 250 points of presence, users can now accelerate the delivery of IPFS content to their users by using Filebase IPFS Dedicated Gateways. Gateways are configurable, and feature different access controls, allowing you to limit what type of content they serve. More details will be shared in a separate blog post later this week!

IPFS Pinning Service API

The Filebase Pinning Service API is now live for all paid users! With this API, users can easily migrate their pins to and from the Filebase platform. It also enables migration tools such as IPFS Pin Sync. As of today, Filebase remains as the only fully-compliant provider of this API specification. For more details, check out our documentation found here.

IPFS Pin Sync

Looking for an easy way to migrate your IPFS pins over to Filebase? IPFS Pin Sync has you covered! Initially developed at Filebase to help our customers migrate their data, IPFS Pin Sync allows you to easily export a list of pins from your current IPFS pinning provider, and allows you to easily import them to Filebase, all with a single click.

IPFS Pin Sync is an open source Javascript application and can be found on GitHub.

IPFS3 Up

To upload large files to IPFS using a simple drag and drop desktop application, IPFS3 Up was developed. IPFS3 Up is an application that allows you to upload files of all sizes from your local computer. It specializes in handling large files or folders by creating .CAR files under the hood. Once a .CAR file is created, it utilizes the Filebase S3 Multipart Upload API for ultimate reliability, allowing you to easily upload multi-GB folders and files without having to worry about TCP connection timeouts or resuming broken uploads.

IPFS3 Up is currently in Beta. It is open source and is also available on GitHub.

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New Pricing

Starting today, Filebase will now offer separate pricing plans for Sia and IPFS storage. Our IPFS pricing model will offer 1 free tier and 3 paid tiers. These tiers will be for data stored on the IPFS network only, and data storage on the Sia network will be an optional, additional charge. If you’re only storing data on Sia, it will be available through a separate subscription that does not include IPFS storage.

Our new IPFS pricing model looks like the following:

Let’s break down these new IPFS paid tiers, and take a look at some of the changes being made to the free tier.

5GB-Free Tier

Filebase will remain a free-to-use platform for all users. Users in the free tier can store up to 5 GB of data, with a maximum of 1,000 individual files. After 5 GB or 1,000 individual files, users will need to upgrade to a paid subscription.

The 5GB-Free Tier includes the following:

• 5 GB of IPFS Storage
• 5 GB of IPFS Bandwidth
• 1,000 Total Files Pinned to IPFS
• S3-Compatible API

The 5GB Free Tier will impose the following limitations:

• The Filebase Public IPFS Gateway will be rate limited
• S3 API Requests are rate limited
• Storage and bandwidth are both limited to 5 GB

The following features are NOT included in the 5GB-Free Tier:

• Public S3 Buckets
• Dedicated IPFS Gateways
• IPFS Pinning Service API

New Paid Subscription Tiers

Starter Subscription: $20/month

WHAT'S INCLUDED:

Data Storage:

• 200 GB IPFS Storage. Additional storage over 200 GB is billed @ $0.15/GB.
• Unlimited number of pinned files

Bandwidth:

• 400 GB IPFS Bandwidth. Additional bandwidth is billed @ $0.015/GB.

Additional Features:

• 1 Dedicated IPFS Gateway
• IPFS Pinning Service API
• S3-Compatible API
• Unlimited API Requests
• Unlimited Filebase Public Gateway Bandwidth

Pro Subscription: $100/month

WHAT'S INCLUDED:

Data Storage:

• 1,000 GB IPFS Storage. Additional storage over 1,000 GB is billed @ $0.12/GB.
• Unlimited number of pinned files

Bandwidth:

• 2,000 GB IPFS Bandwidth. Additional bandwidth over 2,000 GB is billed @ $0.015/GB.

Additional Features:

• 3 Dedicated IPFS Gateways
• IPFS Pinning Service API
• S3-Compatible API
• Unlimited API Requests
• Unlimited Filebase Public Gateway Bandwidth

Business Subscription: $500/month

WHAT'S INCLUDED:

Data Storage:

• 5,000 GB IPFS Storage. Additional storage over 5,000 GB is billed @ $0.10/GB.
• Unlimited number of pinned files

Bandwidth:

• 10,000 GB IPFS Bandwidth. Additional bandwidth over 10,000 GB is billed @ $0.015/GB.

Additional Features:

• 5 Dedicated IPFS Gateways
• IPFS Pinning Service API
• S3-Compatible API
• Unlimited API Requests
• Unlimited Filebase Public Gateway Bandwidth

Enterprise IPFS plans are also available. Please reach out to us directly for more details at hello@filebase.com

Sia Pricing

Our pricing model for Sia remains largely unchanged. Users who wish to store private encrypted data on Sia can still utilize our industry-leading Sia integration. As before, pricing starts at $5.99 for 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth, and any extra storage or bandwidth beyond that is charged by the GB.

If you DO have a paid IPFS subscription, the $5.99 minimum monthly fee is waived, and you will be billed at $0.0059 per GB for both data storage and bandwidth for any data stored in a Sia bucket. No storage or bandwidth is included, and everything is billed by the GB.

If you DO NOT have a paid IPFS subscription, Sia usage is billed at the above rates, but will include our standard $5.99 minimum monthly subscription charge, along with 1 TB of storage and bandwidth.

Why are we making these changes?

When we first added support for IPFS back in March of this year, our initial integration was built on top of the Sia network. While Sia works great for files of all sizes, there is some latency overhead involved with making requests to a decentralized network. With IPFS, files are broken down into smaller chunks known as blocks. For example, a 1 MB file pinned to IPFS is typically broken down into 4 smaller 256 KB blocks. With our initial Sia-based IPFS integration, this meant we needed to make 4 round trip requests to the Sia network just to process one IPFS file download, and each of these requests introduced latency overhead, often leading to performance issues and perceived slowness.

As our IPFS offering has grown, we've found that this type of architecture does not work well at larger scales. Performance is a very important attribute for us, so we've made significant architecture changes to support IPFS well into the future. Moving forward, when you pin a file to IPFS using Filebase, the file will be stored on 3 separate servers. Each server is located in a different data center, and in a different country. We call this Geo-Redundant IPFS Pinning.

We've accomplished this massive feat by running our own IPFS nodes with a unique disk configuration and layout. Every IPFS node that we operate features a mirrored storage pool, which gives us high availability at the local storage layer. In addition, each file is actively pinned and announced from 3 different data centers. This means 3 IPFS peer ID's will be returned when an ipfs dht findprovs command is executed with a Filebase-pinned CID. Announcing to the DHT from multiple locations also increases content discoverability, which ultimately leads to increased performance as well.

Running bare metal servers in data centers around the world comes with an increased operational cost, and that is our primary reason for making this IPFS pricing change. When we first announced IPFS support, we also made it clear that our pricing after the beta period was going to be increased. We believe that we have achieved the perfect balance between cost and performance, and are now positioned to provide a level of service that our customers have been asking for.

How does this affect me?

For new users, these changes go into effect today.

If you are an existing paid IPFS customer, you will have until January 31st, 2023 to select one of the new IPFS pricing plans. This can be done at any time from the Billing page of the Filebase dashboard. If a selection is not made by this date, your IPFS subscription will be automatically migrated to our $20 IPFS Starter plan.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time via LiveChat, Discord, or via email: hello@filebase.com